The Astrology of March 2024: Wallowing

The early portion of 2024, or first quarter, is for the most part a continuation of 2023’s final quarter; the very sluggish, slow, excessively yin immersion in the baseline values and substances of the moment. As stated in previous forecasts this had to do with late 2023’s proliferation of retrograded planets all at once slowly coming to station and still slowly resume forward motion as well as Jupiter In Taurus ruling over Saturn in Pisces. Some nativities found this for a period to be a healing balm, where no call for change was necessary or even appropriate or possible in the short term and they could settle down and fully relax into their circumstances, whereas others, who lack significant earth signatures, felt they were swamped in a stagnation nightmare. Generally, even the Taurus heavy nativities began to squirm as Venus proceeded into displeasing territory, particularly most recently as she’s been in Aquarius, a sign in square relation to Jupiter in Taurus. For the rest of us this simply emphasizes our particular life layers in particular ways, problematically flooding and making sodden our Pisces regions and showing us how the basics, the status quo, the slow, the methodological and the simple could be to our benefit considering there is a lot of leaking going on. The odd element to this is that Uranus hanging out close to the last third of Taurus makes it quite obvious that these very baseline safety grounds of Taurus made to seem opportune via Jupiter are only going to be so stable for so long, and are actually some of the most volatile substances in play in the medium term. It’s a situation which perfectly engenders both blinders and blurry goggles, making anything outside the stretch of the next few days too murky to see very well.

Ernst Nepo

On a mundane level we have endless ceasefire calls mixed with obvious staged sports and celebrity extravaganzas while the reality of text to video AI generated content throws suspicion upon all media images whatsoever anyway— while most people struggle to maintain their lifestyles economically and hold to conservative behaviors, yet the gradual, moderate upturn in the market served to create wealth for traders and those rich enough to have people managing their wealth for them, it was not bullish enough to have the rest of the populace riding high, but instead slow motion trampled over. Presidential laser eye memes eerily signal Bitcoin support, and indeed the US government holds the most BTC of any nation, largely acquired via confiscation. Edward Snowden recently predicted a national government will be revealed to have been secretly buying large amounts of Bitcoin (set suddenly follow suit with El Salvador?) and days later massive amounts of BTC move from the wallets holding the US confiscated funds from the Bitfinex hack of 2016. The suspected couple pled guilty to the theft in the Summer just after the near conjunction of Venus and Mars before Venus’ retrograde, and now the funds suddenly move to undisclosed wallets just after Venus and Mars conjoined in Aquarius. Another story which follows the same timing is the LK-99 superconductor home experiment craze over the summer around the near conjunction and Sam Altman of OpenAI now following the actual conjunction calling for 7 trillion dollars to revolutionize the superconductor industry.

These stories are relevant as its events on the Venus timeline as she is ruling over Jupiter in Taurus and Jupiter is ruling over Saturn in Pisces in turn. So, Venus in March preparing the waters for Mars to enter and swim next is significant to how things of value in this rapidly unfolding Air epoch flow. Especially as it will be this Pisces Mars conjunct Saturn who rules over the Aries eclipse activity in April. Although, Venus will then be in Aries, forming a dispositer committee, a complete loop of planetary rulerships. Leading up to fire activity already is interesting, with the Texas fires showing up in the news only one day after the immolation at the Israel embassy, and two weeks after Elon Musk tweeted a seemingly flaming outline of the state of Texas. Even the Airforce enlistee who immolated himself had Texas ties, he had worked in DevOps cycbersecurity in San Antonio. Ready for an eclipse conjunct Chiron, a Mercury retrograde and a Venus transit through fiery Aries next month? Burning, beef, Bitcoin, and superconductors preloaded into now normalized technocratic projects and the US deciding whatever is to be done with hacked digital billions. Look ahead to the April 20th Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Taurus as all the activity I’m talking about occurred when that degree was opposed or squared. With late July 2023 and mid to late February as time markers, and peering ahead across March to April, look in your personal life for where things of dependable value are being considerably modified, where there are possible flashpoints, and where you’d maybe like to get out of the pool connecting you to everything else but can’t.

Beau White

The ironic part to this is Pluto’s January 20th movement into Aquarius. Being very much in the muck of the moment rather than in an inspired trajectory means that we are viscerally between our pasts and our futures. Saturn’s copresence and inevitable conjunction with Neptune ensures we are disillusioned wholly with the world we are immersed in and Jupiter’s upcoming conjunction with Uranus on April 20th is already making the notion of changing the most basic material factors of our existence sound like a good enough idea, Over the course of February we were steadily receiving schematics for the future we could not possibly begin to understand yet, written in their AI-Alien-Quantum code languages from a post-economic, multidimensional, teleportation and levitation reality up the timeline. Nevertheless, getting to gaze over tomorrows’s power paradigms, collective obsessions, and anxieties over dark koans in the destined to soon be inhabited mental frameworks created a surreal atmosphere while thoroughly bottomed out in the profound Now-Muck.

Beau White

Amidst an inebriated midnight moonshine sodden howl into the fog infested sky oppressing over the perma-bog a tele-prompt resonates into the mental processing unit that the silver orb is ready to modulate the story in play and be prepared for an update requiring extended sleep sequences as the narrative adjusts to the new plot elements. The retrogrades in Leo 2023 and 2024 have accomplished a kind of Barbie—TechDystopia spectrum which updates steampunk aesthetics in the post-Capricornian moment and makes for a not very inviting contemporary reverse-TheTerror fashion climate, as the Sci-Fi bit is very Now, so exceedingly boring and the Incroyables and Merveilleuses don’t understand their own signaling and act merely as vacuums. Regardless of total loss of meaning or coherence on the cultural as well as individual level there is still plenty of tension to be had among the fixed signs despite the passivity stupor Jupiter was offering recently while in slow motion, as Uranus’ agenda to radically transform all currency and commodity will likely become all too lucid when Jupiter conjoins the unstable outer planet, meaning rapid mutation in our personal lives and in the world which may come about as opportunity via volatility. My metaphorical yet possibly literal guess is something like: flood disaster—resource looting—economic relief as digital finance product. This is running on the rails of: crisis of permeability—intense independent action—value growth within instability.

The mutable signs are dealing with Saturn, and by April, Mars coming to conjoin Saturn which will be ruling over the Aries North Node Total Solar Eclipse, Mercury’s retrograde in Aries, as well as Venus in Aries, who in turn will be ruling over Jupiter conjoining Uranus in Taurus. The drama gets distributed throughout cardinal, fixed and mutable modalities, but it's the mutable signs in which the stress of this dynamic transition from winter to spring pivots. Look to the mutable people in your life who may seem clearly to be under fire right now, acting scattered, overwhelmed or on the fritz from anxiety factors. When the sloppy and slippery soap of change gets squeezed too hard by April 8th the energy will direct the projectile in the Aries direction in accordance with our desire for direct action and problematically independent thinking at the time. Its due to this rogue propulsion that tables get flipped over that might not be able to be re-righted and we decide the world might be ready for some belly up with legs extending into the air, that would suit us quite well actually.

Masami Teraoka

March is all that sets the stage for April’s drama and foreshadows the plot twists being arranged in plain sight. Much of this has to do with Venus swimming across the Piscean pool and sweetening it before Mars follows suit and churns up the same waters later. What we fall hopelessly in love with in March, that might seem only totally saccharine and even angelic throughout could be the very same agent adding dangerous amounts of chop to the water only days or weeks later, as if the beautiful synchronized swimming that entranced us becomes the chum induced feeding frenzy once the sharks show up and close in. In this way there is a bit of the warnings against Sirens, Selkies, Sea-Nymphs and the like here. Things are not necessarily as they at first seem, and the beautiful, harmless and pleasure promising actors in the situation actually have very deadly potential which is hard to if not impossible to navigate away from once you are in drowning distance, hence April’s obvious uncomfortable dash directly to wherever its possible to shoot for. Venus brings the Calypso spell into effect mid month, likely as the weather promises to improve, the Sun sidling up to Neptune at that time, and Mercury only recently having disentangled from the high-saturation dissolver of reality. Mars will have just squared Uranus, the mental itch around new ideas about what needs to be done are setting off the changing fundamental things with urgency alarms and there’s a lot out there that appears delicious when we let our attention wander, especially as we’re talking in simple terms directly about our independence.

By the 18th Mercury steps upon the Head of the Serpent, the North Node, and in doing so walks into his retrograde shadow. The Sun has just rolled past peak Neptunian trance so it's likely we will not be watching where we are going, having been proceeding under hypnosis. Within the final hour of the 19th the Sun enters Aries, signaling Spring and marking Astrological New Year. Mercury heads for Chiron, the Sun sextiles Pluto and Mars is still co-present the most outer planet in Aquarius. What exactly is going on here? It’s worth noting the soft aspect relationship between Aquarius and Aries. They are collaborative with one another, they work hand in hand. Aquarius is avant garde, pioneering, willing to go out on a limb and and beyond the parameters of what has been conceptualized or explored before and Aries is the most independent and autonomous, is more concerned with acting than considering the repercussions. There are new technologies, networks, syndicates, collectives, mental frameworks, and concepts in the world, some might be improvements and others born of future fears, within which we must act and respond and tactically maneuver our lives, and staying on our toes can require us to go solo in some sense to take paths not yet walked in and territories currently uncharted. This is a tender trespass, and it may require cutting ties or unraveling some sensitive relationships, but if we are going to continue to be in love with the world in a trying time, the immersion required could mean branching off on our own into the unknown in some sense or another.

Reginal Marsh

Meanwhile, in the world at large many struggle with digital addiction, but the social media society which has replaced much of our organic ways of connecting and being with community has flatly failed and currently spirals further into pornographic degradation and optical-cognitive abuse. People are distancing themselves from it with no alternative approach in place to keep in touch with loved ones or even what is happening in the world or wider cultural sphere. Meanwhile, the Google search engine flatlines, coming up short, can no longer give us what we ask. Most people turn to GPT, who frankly is not much better and certainly more biased.

We get off the illness inducing carnival ride to empty streets, boarded up with obsolete newspapers blowing around. Trendy restaurants don’t even replace neighborhood bakeries and groceries anymore. Now real estate blocks are cleared and replaced with nothing. We’re in a drift. As humans-taught-to-be-brands we are competitive with whomever we encounter. We trudge through the Now-Muck. We’re obligated to be there. We cannot control the plot, it moves at its own pace. Inside the digital its dictated by those that curate it. Outside the digital not much happens, just the dim echo murmur of what goes on within, the digital blorbing out into the organic world, like a staged photoshoot, or simply radiating through thin air from towers to devices.

JunglePeril

There of course is also nature itself. The old constant; Once glorious when it was the icing on the cake, but now it is the whole cake, and there is no icing, just radiation making the surface smell of hot electronics. “Let them eat cake”- we hear the ‘Nobody’ of memes suggest. Have a great helping of the last free things which are soon to also become very expensive, maybe the most expensive. Whole lands, whole habitats, whole species, whole ecologies economized as carbon units or dealt with like coordinates on a blank grid. But of course late April’s Jupiter-Uranus table flip, and the bum rush to get-me-some, and the rapid mutation in an instant, perhaps the long awaited “new normal”. But before this we get pleasantly confused throughout March, and in an underlying anxiety of the future, in a total amnesia of the past, in an obligatory immersion in what we still enjoy, we fall in love with almost everything again, entranced like a teenage romance, and from here, as if by accident, mistake, misunderstanding, woopsie, April’s incendiary catalysts are lit. Like a Hollywood film from the 40s where you watch the protagonist drunk on sentiment derail his entire life and all of those around him in some kind of unrealistic stupor he can’t shake awake from until its too late. We’ve lost emotional intelligence and are so heavily saturated with collectivity or artificial interconnectedness we are as a society too empathically-inebriated to be responsible for ourselves. Here comes our Cadillac careening off the cliff and before we know it we’re bandaged up in the epilogue, or if we’re lucky and the studios like us, the sequel.

Murat Terzioglu

Mars enters Pisces and begins swimming with blade in teeth towards Saturn on the 22nd, just As Venus has passed over Saturn and the Sun is only three days into Aries. Mercury has made it a few degrees to the other side of Chiron and is starting to slow down to station a week later. We might just begin the “wait, I didn’t have to… but I, uhhh…” It might not be a matter of what we thought but what we felt and what we felt was necessary as things up close could have taken on whole world size scale emotionally. Venus and Saturn together can go a few ways. Often there is creative parameters and romantic obligation, but in Pisces this could be an obligation to be open and loose, to allow more. As Venus will be conjunct Saturn sextile to Jupiter in the sign she rules, there is both aspect sight lines and mutual reception going on, while the planet of desire, love and values is also in her exaltation and quite strong. This is a very nuanced and subtle interchange between layers, signs, modalities and planetary expression. It will likely be nearly impossible to pull the threads apart and understand which bit is coming from where. It's more likely that parts of life feel fused together and intermingled to the point of normally disparate topics have become hopelessly interrelated. This is likely what brings about the thrashing and swimming rapidly towards personal Calypsos once the pressure gets turned up and its every man for himself towards the start of April, but as early as March 24th’s South Node Lunar Eclipse in Libra, which will be trying to eliminate whatever has overladen the scales of relational evaluation— resist the urge to eject, instead relax the weight and simplify the social mix to refinement. It’s sink or swim with both malefics at large in the empathic world pool. Jupiter is making solid ground look quite nice, but clearly we can see its kind of a trap as Uranus is just behind him, the place is set for revolution as soon as we arrive on the beach.

Rembrandt

So where is the advice in this? If we know we are about to make a big mess of our lives because we are going to enchanted-dolphin-arch from destructive amounts of confusion toward sketchy, temporary safeties that are actually booby trapped while possibly wrecking relationships to gain some autonomy or room for excitement in our lives as we’ve become too dependent on others to keep things balanced for too long— then we have to attempt the best version of this entire quagmire that we can conjure. March sets up April’s insanity, which in turn loads the rest of 2024, which in itself is the year which allows for the even more profound shifts of 2025. 2024 is the confusing final episode of the sequence before the plot writes itself into the future. This is the “its not all adding up” last set of scenes that lead towards the entirely different program we find ourselves in later. Flux. Change. We are in it. The muck and swamp our boots feel sucking against our legs with each attempted step is in such a state because at last the solid has liquified. The world is in a clay state, and we’re experiencing profound receptivity, but it's not ready to set into another stable shape yet, so we’re morphing, shapeshifting.

There’s only enough stability to pretend things are under control, but not enough to prove it; like waving from a distance everything is ok firmly planted on the ground of an island rapidly eroding to complete dissolve. The ground is solid only enough to stand but so loose its impossible to walk anywhere in the thick mud. Regardless, we have to take advantage of what solidity we do have before there is only intense activity and no identifiable ground at all. The key word right now is “impressionable”— a sticky state of being able to be formed by whatever force happens into our orbs. We’ll probably welcome the Aries fire when it comes. It’ll be nice to shoot the gun and hear a sharp crack after clobbering our obstacles with a heavy sack of who knows what. Boom. Done. Boom. Done. We won’t really want to look back. And that’s the rub. Suddenly, when we do and we realize we’re actually getting pretty far from shore. Well fuck. By the time we get back they’ll be gone, and I’ll miss that appointment, and the food will have spoiled, and… Mercury is headed back around the Chiron pole during April either way, and this time we’re holding on to our sidearms, so once theres a hot uptick it doesn’t go down again. For the moment we want to watch out for what beautiful realities we merge with in the sweeter moments before it turns too spicy, or maybe more appropriately before the drinks get laced and the well gets poisoned. Soak it up while you can but not so much you become sodden.

Beau White

NOTES BY DAY

-Sun sextile Jupiter: orientation to flow state obligations and immersive perspectives collaborating with coherence of basic methodologies and stuff of value

-Venus sextile Chiron: desire for new mental frameworks and attraction to pioneering aesthetics collaborating with discomfort integrating autonomous action

-Venus square Uranus: desire for new mental frameworks and attraction to pioneering aesthetics clashing with urgency to radically change the baseline methodology

-Mercury sextile Uranus: ambient thinking and holistic logic collaborating with radical rhythms and groves and volatile substances

-Mars sextile Chiron: fringe activity and conceptual tactics working hand in hand with healing discomfort in direct, independent action

-Mercury conjunct Neptune: fusion of thinking and communicating faculties with barrierlessness between dream and reality, fully permeable high saturation state, synthetic thinking, cognitive deception

-Mars square Uranus: hypothetical actions and updated tactics clashing with radical shifts in the plan or unstable substances

-Mercury ingress Aries: direct communication, autonomous thinking, competative analysis, impulsive exchanges

-New Moon in Pisces: seeding of inception in the quiet and contemplative space of the immersive, permeable, boundless, empathic, atmosphere, vibes

-Venus ingress Pisces: boundless desire, everything is beautiful, free creativity, romantic looseness

-Sun conjunct Neptune: high saturation vision, orientation to the unreal, fantastical objectives

Reginald Marsh

-Mercury conjunct NN: impulsive thinking, insatiability in ideas of action, rash analysis catalyzes activity

-Mercury enters shadow of RX: begins sequence that will need to be revisited or corrected or clarified later

-Sun ingress Aries: 11:06pm: astrological new year, more yang than yin, spring sprung

-Mercury conjunct Chiron: wounded thinking around independence and effectiveness of communication

-Venus conjunct Saturn: boundless desire fused with flow state stratagem obligation, limitless pleasure fused with responsibility to maintaining a vibe, no clear limit in how much pleasure is appropriate

-Sun sextile Pluto: orientation toward individual action collaborating with new mental frameworks emerging in the collective networks

Barbara von Enger

-Mars ingress Pisces: poetical tactics, responding to the moment in the flow, feeling your opponent empathically, sensitivity to the problem

-Venus sextile Jupiter: limitless pleasure and sense that everything is beautiful working with coherence of the value of the basic substances and opportunities in the status quo

-SN Lunar Eclipse 5 degrees Libra: shedding of things off of the scales of measurement in equalizing the dynamics of relationships, culture and social discourse to arrive at refinement later even if the extraction is harsh in the moment: becoming less diplomatic

-Venus sextile Uranus: limitless pleasure and sense that everything is beautiful working with revolutionary change to the value of the basic substances and sudden shifts in the status quo

Oli Goldsmith